KnowIT: The Starting Point…
I was doing my usual videos streaming on YouTube one night in school, when I came across a video in which I saw kids — I am not talking about college kids here — I mean middle school and high school kids, participating in a hackathon and coming up with magnificent apps and technology. I was dazzled. I didn’t even know how to write basic HTML when I was in primary or Junior secondary school. Seeing these kids in America doing great things like this made me highly impressed. That was when a saying I had heard earlier came to mind: “Brilliance is evenly distributed, but opportunity is not”. I guess it is the simple truth that Andela was founded on. So I thought to myself, “We’ve got really smart kids here in Nigeria, and if they were given the same opportunity as these American kids, they’ll do as well, or even better than those kids. That night, I barely slept, I kept on thinking of how I could make this a reality.
My Ever Wonderful and Highly Supportive Team:
The next day, I quickly assembled a group of my surest friends and they were totally in love with the idea. Some were even more excited than I was. We had a lengthy discussion on how things were going to go. Shortly after that, we had a name ready, people volunteered to do website, others volunteered to write proposals that would be sent to the different high schools in town, some volunteered to source for funds, some already started arguing about the programming language we were going to teach the kids, whether Python or JavaScript. It was fun you know, that part.
So, after much deliberation, we decided that we were going to have a bootcamp, hosted in our school. A ten-day bootcamp, as opposed to sending tutors to each of the interested schools to teach. When I first came up with the name “KnowIT”, it wasn’t really accepted at first but down the road, we embraced it because it conveys our Message. Oh, I must say that I felt thrilled. These guys were going to make it happen!
BootCamp Preparation:

As things were beginning to take shape, other needs had to be met, like the venue for the Bootcamp. Where on earth were we going to get a venue to support a ten-day program for free? As far as we were concerned, we had to get a free venue as there was no way we could pay for a venue, especially since we had no sponsors then. So word got around and soon we started getting suggestions from all over the place. Two of us had a chat with the Dr. Osunade, Director of ITeMS, the centre of technology for the University of Ibadan as well as the Deputy Director, Mr. Biodun Oguntoye. He totally keyed into the plan and he agreed to partner with us, so as to give us a bit of recognition as group of students from the University of Ibadan, whose aim is to make the society we are leaving in a better place by helping the kids in our community.
We started putting things together, deciding the ages we wanted for our bootcamp, how we were going to select the kids. We agreed that we would send invites to five schools and then ask the schools for ten student. That makes fifty, which was our desired target. The venue still remained an issue since we had zero sponsors and we still couldn’t afford the halls and hubs we had gone to inquire about, but we were hopeful.
Proposal letters started flying out, also did letters of introduction and letters for sponsorship, the logo was ready, the website was coming up. Things were falling in line, but the venue still remained a big hurdle. Also, responses were low from schools and also from people that we sent letters for sponsorship. It is at this point that I would love to appreciate our ever supportive Dr Woods, who vetted our proposal and gave us a strong go-ahead. Thank you ma, we are indeed grateful.
As the saying goes “If the mountain does not come to Mohammed, then Mohammed will go to the mountain” . Since we had little or no response from the schools we sent letters to, and we needed these kids to come and learn something different this summer, we decided to go to the schools ourselves. So two by two, like the disciples in the Bible, we set off one fateful Monday morning, carrying our proposal letters and the word of mouth, convincing school principals that kids have to learn how to code. It was indeed a challenging one, as some people needed to be convinced more than the others. By the end of the day, I am proud to say that we reached out to 12 schools. And guess what? We only had a positive response from just one school. I felt so disheartened that I even considered cancelling the program. But no, I had faith, I had so much passion for this that a negative answer was not the final answer for me. There’s still time, I told myself. Now this period was exam period in school and almost everyone got busy preparing for exams. It was pertinent that I thought of another strategy.
One week to the bootcamp and still not even one participant? I’ve seen events flop before, but mine wasn’t going to be added to the statistics. Having an online meeting with the team, we decided that we should just create a registration link and any child whatsoever was invited. So it was “Operation Invite your nephew, niece, younger brother, family friend, church member, cousin, younger sister’s friend, put the posters daily on your whatsApp”. We were going to “catch them young”. By the end of the weekend, we already had 37 kids registered. It was a bit less than I expected, but I was happy all the same. Efforts of Mr. Olanrewaju, a master student of the Department of Computer science did have a huge effect on the publicity as well.
After all the hustle for venue, we decided to write to Computer Science department, University of Ibadan, to spare us one of their lecture halls, to be used as the venue for the 10-day program. Pheww! And just like that, we got a free venue, at last.
As regards sponsorship, we tried our very best, but things didn’t lay out as expected. Well, we patted our backs knowing fully well that we had tried, and maybe for subsequent Bootcamps, we would be covered. So we had to task ourselves. Yeah, I really do not know what I did to deserve such generous and sacrificial teammates, but yeah, they dropped cash. By the weekend, we got 10k from Mr Yusuf Azeem, God bless you sir. And also, when Mr. Oguntoye, Head of Sales, Deli Foods, heard about the program as a result of an invitation sent to him to allow his kids partake in the program, he totally bought the idea and promised to supply us with Deli products to give the kids as refreshment, but was unable to due to time constraints. He still got us four cartons of delicious chin-chin. I can still taste that chin-chin. Mmm… Yummy.
Now the BootCamp:
The Bootcamp started on 31st July, 2017 with 11 participants. We experienced a slight hiccup regarding venue, which we spent most of the day trying to fix while the other members of the team were running the program, keeping the kids engaged. This venue issue was resolved later in the afternoon and the program went smoothly that day.

The program was divided into morning and afternoon sessions, 2 hours for each session. The training lasted from 10am — 3pm daily. With the turn up of just 11 participants on the first day, we felt a little discouraged but still kept the fire burning. We introduced them to the Information Technology field as whole, who a programmer is, what makes one a good programmer and why the demand for programmers is not going to lessen anytime soon. We also talked about the problems by technology in today’s world . Oh! Don’t think my team members were the ones supplying all the answers. I told you that brilliance is equally distributed, didn’t I? We showed them a couple videos to make the program interesting and fun filled.
Day two kicked off with introduction to Algorithm and writing pseudocode. We were amazed by the superb performance of those kids. Since we were having a high engagement, no dulling moment, we were motivated to give it our best. They were introduced to programming using Scratch later in the afternoon and they built some pretty good “mini-apps” on their own.

Day three featured more on scratch, and once more they wowed us.
Then, on Thursday. All play and no work makes Jack… I dunno what to fill in there. So we decided to get to work. We kicked off with the primary programming language, Python. Yeah, Python won the “Python vs JavaScript” fight. We had the expectation of it being a bit complicated for them, but then, we were disappointed. The rate at which they grabbed it was caused a great wonder amongst my teammates, I remember someone even saying that he still doesn’t understand the python we were taught in 100 level, but here are these kids. Most of the kids translated the pseudocode we had written earlier into functional Python Codes.

Their performance throughout the course of the BootCamp was indeed excellent. We saw 8 year old, Maisara already coding in python, 11 years old Murewa was not left behind, amongst others. We had a session where a similar lover of IT evangelism, Rasheed Ridwan, came around to teach the kids Object Oriented Programming with Python, I have to say that he is a natural teacher for kids. The way he broke it down into pieces and they were able to grasp the concept of OOP, that was amazing. Before the end of his session, he asked them what they have learnt, their responses blew my mind.

We gave them practical assignments to do at the end of everyday, which they all did and it yielded jaw-dropping results. Before we realized it, Friday arrived, the end of the program. We did a recap of what they have learnt so far, we gave them a little project to build within two hours. Only a few of them were able to complete it but the attempts by others were pretty cool as well. The winner of the project exhibition was Uche, who completed the project with something cool.
We had a chilling session where we just had refreshments and fun after the entire program, with series of photographs. The HOD Computer Science, Mrs. Oladejo really blew my mind. She made souvenirs for the program, which we shared to the kids and the tutors present.
All Glory to God for the success of the program, I must say, this is just the beginning.

My Appreciation goes to:
Glory to Almighty God for this idea, support and successful execution of this first BootCamp.
The main Shout Out goes to all the members of KnowIT… This BootCamp wouldn’t have happened without you guys, you are the brain behind it all, the planning, the meetings, going to schools, sending invites, You guys are awesome. Starting from John Paul, Abraham Ogbole, Victor Ewere, Olubode Michael, Falomo Olumide, Okeke Arinze, Ahmed Olawale, Obi Uchenna David, Ebhomielen Ofure, Majeed Suleman, Ishola Ayomide, Dogo Patience, Adebayo-Ige Toyosi, James Attasiem, Tinubu James, Adegboye Oluwatayo , Femi and others who were present to support during the course of the program, I am indeed grateful and I want you all to know that I truly appreciate your support.
To those that supported us financially and in any kind, Mr. Fela Oguntoye, Mr. Olanrewaju, Mr. Azeem Yusuf, Dr. Folajimi, Dr. Oladejo, Dr. Seyi Osunade and Dr. Woods, we are very very thankful for the support and for believing in us. We hope to achieve more great things together. To computer science department, thank you for hosting us, The likes of IBK, Mr. AY and Mr. Oje, I say a hearty Thank You.
It doesn’t stop here …

But trust me, this is not where the story ends! My team and I are even more determined than ever before to bridge the digital divide in our part of the world and to equip the young ones with skills required to solve problems of the future. With this in mind, more programmes like Bootcamp 1.0 are in the works. We plan to engage local secondary schools directly a lot more, just as was originally intended, while working closely with the participants to ensure that these skills remain with them in whatever career path they choose. The future is indeed bright.
What tutors and participants are saying …
Participants:
“The BootCamp was very interesting, we had lot of fun even while learning and we did lot of coding. I gained a lot of coding knowledge as well as mathematics. The teaching was also interesting” — Hanniyah (10yrs)
I wanted to learn a lot of things I before the bootcamp, but I couldn’t learn because I didn’t have the right materials and I couldn’t figure them out alone. I was introduced to OOP, hacking and its concepts. Now I’m better informed than I ever was.” — Akinyemi (13yrs)
Tutors:
It was a 2 weeks boot camp that exceeded my expectations. The kids were very interested in the program and a lot of them showed real computational skills. It was a rewarding experience for the team and I feel confident that in a few years time, we’ll have young world class Nigerian programmers who got their start at the KnowIt boot camp. I’m proud to be part of that. — Arinze
More feedbacks can be on our website: knowit.org.ng.
Join us on our mission. Become a volunteer, partner or sponsor our upcoming events. Visit our website: knowit.org.ng and follow KnowIT on Facebook: @knowitng and Twitter: @knowit_official
Biodun Chris
Executive Director
